edgeio lets anyone be craigslist

There's a good post from Dan Farber pointing out the disruptive potential behind edgeio's marketplace platform which has just gone into beta.

Keith and his team at edgeio (disclosure: I am a small investor through TAG) are really doing some creative things with listings and changing the way publishers of all sizes can generate revenue from classified advertising online.

For more on the product, see an interview with product manager John Dowd on Scoble's Podshow.



edgeio is really challenging the traditional destination model for listings business and I think offering services to publishers has real promise. Publishers, both big and small are looking for support in helping generate more traffic, inventory and revenue.

I still feel that LinkExchange was one of the great pioneer's in this space, in fact it looks the model is re-emerging in South East Asia.

Google's AdSense clearly put publisher services on the map and doing $1.2bn in Q4 '06 ad revenue is certainly not shabby in terms of showing the potential for this space - AdSense already accounts fro 37% of Google's revenue.

Now there is a whole new generation of companies offering amazing services to publishers, some of the more interesting at the moment include: Daylife (contextual inventory, disclosure: I'm also an invetsor through TAG), edgeio (classifieds) and AdBrite (text ads). Of course PayPal and Google Checkout are extending the offer from to commerce as well - more on that later.

Watch this space, as the web disaggregates more and more networks (or platforms) which serve the increasingly interesting long-tail as well as the Alexa Top 1-10k will become more and more important.